The increased interest in and use of wireless devices for communication, entertainment, etc., has caused an exponential growth in wireless traffic. To cope with this exponential growth, service providers continue to deploy increasing numbers of wireless access nodes. The feasibility of a very dense deployment of wireless access nodes, however, is predicated on the existence of a backhaul network capable of providing high-data-rate transport for each individual access node in the network. Optical-fiber-based backhaul solutions maximize capacity, and therefore provide an attractive solution for new construction areas. However, in existing buildings and infrastructure, the cost of installing fiber to every access node as required to implement the optical-fiber backhaul solution in a very dense network can be prohibitive.
Wireless self-backhauled solutions provide a reasonable alternative to fiber-optic backhaul solutions, where the same access spectrum is used to provide transport. With wireless self-backhauling, an access node serves not only its own assigned user equipment (UEs), but it also serves its neighboring access nodes as a wireless relay node that relays traffic data to/from a destination/source node in the network. A group of self-backhauling wireless access nodes can form a multi-hop mesh network, where access nodes cooperatively transfer each other's traffic to/from the destination/source node.
For example, wireless access nodes in a network may operate as relay nodes to assist with the communication of traffic data between a source-destination node pair. Each relay node receives data from its immediate predecessor, and relays or forwards the received data to the next relay node (or to the destination node). In theory, all access nodes in a wireless network may serve as relay nodes for a source-destination node pair, and the destination node decodes the signals received from all of the relay nodes, which maximizes performance. As the number of access nodes increases, however, it becomes increasingly unrealistic/impractical to expect a source-destination node pair to use all (or even most) of the access nodes in the network as relay nodes. Thus, there remains a need for a solution that addresses the practical aspects of implementing wireless self-backhauled solutions.